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The 660 Gallon Brewery Fuel Cell
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's University of Queensland has secured a $115,000 grant for a 660-gallon fuel cell that should produce 2 kilowatts of power. A prototype has been operating at the university laboratory for three months. This fuel cell type is essentially a battery in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol, plus in this instance produces clean water."
Call me Homer Simpson, but all I heard was "beer, beer, beer, Mmmmm beeerrrr".
that's 20 100 watt bulbs.
Not bad.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Alcohol isn't brewing "waste" -- it's the entire point!
So it sits on the campus consuming sugar, starches and alcohol. Just like a graduate student then, except you also get some useful output. Should revolutionize academia; just imagine what this device is capable of once it gets tenure.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Am I the only one who immediately thought of Bender from Futurama?
It'll be nice to know that beer is saving the planet!
What will all the freshmen drink?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
before we see a press release claiming a breakthrough in power generation: "By placing horses in a giant wheel that is connected to a turbine and then racing them, scientists have found a way to generate all the power we need on a steady supply of oats and barley. Also generates lots of gambling revenue for the state."
Don't forget the waste : Co2 (carbon dioxide, aka, greenhouse gas)
Face the future : YOU are doomed
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Note that TFA indicates that this is a method to remove brewer's waste, with the byproduct of producing electricity. As a method for producing electricity in general, it is not a clean method because you'd first have to produce alcohol (which would then we cleaned by the bacteria). Producing alcohol produces *VAST* amounts of CO2.
I have worked as an assistant winemaker at a small vinyard. Our vats are 3000 litres apiece. Even with these small vats, the temperature reached by the yeast cell division is HOT to the touch (but not enough for thermal electricity generation). If you were to walk into the room where the vats are without first ventilating the room, you would pass out because the oxygen in your lungs feels like it is literally sucked out (not sure of the actual physical process involved). If no one were around, you would die from asphyxiation. It is wierd sensation, let me tell you.
660 gallons is about fifteen barrels. 2 kW isn't that much so maybe for my house I need 6 kW. That's approx. forty five barrels. That's a lot of barrels in the back yard.
fear that People for the Ethical Treatment of Bacteria will shut this one down.
Imagine a beo...(hic)...a be...(hic)...imagine a...(hic)...imagine...what was I saying?...(hic)...Imagine...John Lennon was the best Beatle.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
New Belgium Brewery, most famous for Fat Tire and Sunshine, produce 10% of their electricity using the methane that is produced from bacteria feeding off of their waste water.
Beige is by far the best color any computer case has ever been produced in.
Well... I, for one, welcome our new thoroughly sloshed yet constantly wired overlords!
"Six bottles in one hand? That's nothing, those lads at Guinness are powering the entirety of Dublin with their brewery!"
"Electrical power from beer effluvia?! BRILLIANT!"
Ugly girl, Myspace girl, faggoty retro guys, and pile of puke. Yup, typical Mac users.
We're all going to die. i intend to deserve it.
Waste? Waste?! Methinks they have not thought this "brewing process" through.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
The digester in this small (330k population) plant generates methane which fires converted gasoline engines to generate electricity. The waste heat goes to warming the digester. There's still solid waste though.
Burning methane is a GoodTHing. Methane has approx 27 times the greenhouse effect of CO2, so burning it produces power and reduces greenhouse gases.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Brewers waste hey? They should include Four-X beer. It's Queensland's native brew, but the rest of Australia loves to hate it.
115,000 Australian dollars is 95,404 US dollars as I post this message.
--
make install -not war
660 gallons is a LOT of fluid. for reference the average 100 gallon tank will be 2 yards by 1.5 feet by 1.5 feet.
so this thing would be about the size of a king sized bed at the least, and it's only generating enough to power 20 100 watt bulbs. From the energy ratings i remember on our appliances it wouldn't even power a single family home.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol
Also know as Vegemite.
How much electricity one uses is determined by what one does with the electricity. If we count all the energy used by a family, both at home and at work, and for heating and airconditioning, 6 kW isn't a bad estimate. If we were to supply all our energy by this process, we would have the equivalent of a whole bunch of barrels in every back yard. Unless the process improves, we are talking about some serious realestate.
I'm curious about is how often the 660 gallon tank has to be refilled, or what the flow rate (in beers/hour?) is. A technology that takes waste products, and turns it into clean water and electricity is something to be applauded (think pulp mills), but 2 Kwh from a 3-ton battery does not seem very efficient -- my own body (fueled on beer alone) can do better than that. However, the pure water output is one thing this device produces, unlike my chemical plant.
Finally someone found a good use for Fosters beer. It's certainly not good for drinking.
Although we do manage to sell it to the Americans and claim that it is beer, they seem to buy it.
Charles
--
Violence is the first refuge of the idiot.
Isn't that what beer is???
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
Aye, I would guess that the next step would be adding a way to scrub/store the CO2 exhaust. There has to be some use for it, and the output would be in a small contained area with a low output, perfect for capturing in tanks for some use. Any ideas?
Ooh, I just thought of one after I hit submit- circulate it (obviously not at 100% concentration) through small sealed greenhouses used to grow the plants needed to feed the power cell's bacteria- not only does the CO2 boost plant production, but you'd be producing fresh O2 for release back into the atmosphere, as long as you time it so you don't leak CO2 when you open the greenhouse to harvest (cut the CO2 input off with enough time for the plants to consume it down to normal atmospheric levels by the time they're ready for harvest). IANA botanist, but I'm sure they could find a way to make it work.
Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. --Benjamin Franklin.
A man who knew a bit about both beer and electricity. Think he's smiling down from heaven about this, or puzzled it took us so long?
Sorry been there done that. Buy Fat Tire beeer and save the planet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Belgium_Brewing_C ompany
They generate 1/3 of their power from beer waste generating methane. (See energy prectices)
WHAT A WASTE OF GOOD ALCOHOL!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
the phrase 'drunk with power'
ACK NAK RST
It would work better if you simply made it a continuous process. Have it so the "greenhouse" is actually a very slow moving conveyor upon which a medium of sugar water or something is poured(again, very slowly), and then pace it so the plants at the end have reached a certain mass by the time they reach the end. The only issue is that it would be so ridiculously slow and inefficient that you might not as well do it. The byproducts are part of the carbon cycle anyway(Thus carbon neutral), so quit whining.
It's been a long time.
"Beer plus Science... equals good!"
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
So many discoveries end up being spinoffs of other discoveries. This fuel cell is a pleasant but unanticipated result of experiments to split the beer atom and put the bubbles back in beer. You may think I'm a yahoo, but no, I'm serious.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
This is why I'm not so worried about companies going green.
Fact of the matter is ALL pollution can be considered an inefficiency.
Our economics system is designed to reward and continually improve efficiency.
As time approaches infinity pollution will approach zero.
The only question is if that's enough to save us.
I personally believe that we at one of the two extremes: either we aren't appreciatively changing the climate or we are already screwed.
By screwed, I mean even if you killed all the humans and stopped all factories the Earth's climate will still deteriorate to the point where humans can survive.
I also believe, based on our understanding of climate change, we can't determine which one we are at.
Buying bread from a man in brussels
He was six foot four and full of muscles
I said, do you speak-a my language?
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich
"Do yourselves a favour and try some Marmite." - and be labeled a traitor, never!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Just a nitpick, but is it really 2500 liters instead if 660 gallons? TFA says
The 660-gallon fuel cell will be 250 times bigger than a prototype that has been operating at the university laboratory and according to Google 660 gallons is about 2498 liters, so it sounds to me like the prototype is "10 liters" instead of "2.64 gallons". A two and a half cubic meter container is quite large in any case.it must be dollaridoos.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Just use it to generate fresh, clean, sparkling water. D'oh!
Yeah right. And dont reproduce. Remember, there's nothing more wasteful than kids!Be efficient!!
No, no -- we all need big houses, to put all our stuff in.
We need all our stuff (and the house) to keep up with the Joneses, and to watch TV without being sad about all those shiny things we don't have.
We need to keep up with the Joneses and buy the things on TV because lots of consumption keeps our economy going.
We need to keep the economy going so we can have well-paying jobs, manufacturing and supporting more and more stuff.
We need well-paying jobs to pay all the bills for repairing/maintaining our stuff.
Oh, and to pay the mortgage on our big houses.
[...not necessarily a direct comment on the GP post; this is just a cycle I've been thinking about...]
"This fuel cell type is essentially a battery in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol ...."
Its not bad enough that we're killing off honey bees, polar bears, dolphins, tigers, and pandas, but now we need to do THIS?
SUGAR, STARCH, and ALCOLHOL IS NOT WASTE!!! THAT'S **BEER**!!!!!
Why, for the love of all that's holy, do we need to create something that might one day consume all of the beer in the world.
STOP THE MADNESS BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Funny this guy converted it to gallons for the americans out there, now for everyone else, that's 2.5 kilolitres.
Ok so what waste material are they talking about?
In making beer (and I do this at home so I feel I know atleast a little about it) you have several stages with "waste" product - but I wouldn't exactly describe them as starch, sugar and alcahol - to be honest its mostly fibre... or atleast so I thought...
First you malt the barley (basically a slow roast though thats an oversimplification).... can't really see any waste coming from here.
Then you mash the grains, ie keep in water at about 60-65C for a couple of hours, this causes the enzymes in the grain to convert the stored starch in the grain into sugar that yeast can later consume.
You then sparge the grain (think pouring a watering can with a fine spray) over the grain the gentle extract this sugar. How you throw whats left of the grain away (waste product 1 - mashed grain)
Now you boil the water you collected along with hops to add flavour, strain off the water and you are left with hops (waste product 2, hops that have been boiled in high sugar content water)
Then you leave the beer to ferment and for a commerical brewery parsturising, carbonate and can/bottle the beer (a terrible and evil process, but then not everyone has the taste for real ale) there will be sediment left in the fermenter than is the final waste product, this will also have some beer in it... waste product 3.
So we have the malted barely that has been mashed and sparged, mashing should have converted as much of the starch to sugar as possible. Spraying should has washed off as much of that sugar as possible, the remains? the non starch part of the grain
The hops will have soaked up some of the wort (effectively sugared water) and then you have the material the hops are made of, some starch and mostly fibre like any seed.
The sediment should not contain and sugar, but it will hard the same or close) alacohol content as the final beer... it probably also contains plenty of yeast (dead and still viable)
Actually I think writing this out I may have convinced myself.... its stuff that they would be throwing out anyway and it is fairly well concentrated (atleast compared to raw harvesting of bio matter) as long as the alcohol is not too toxic to the baterial breaking it down I start to see how this would work...
Interesting idea... not worth trying myself - making 5 gallons of beer I wouldn't have enough waste product to fill a 1 gallon bucket, but scaled up it would be interesting to see!!
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kombucha
how absurd to present that digits/machines can remedy yOUR nearly infactdead health care system. it will more likely require properly trained & motivated (ie: other than by greed/ego) people, & time.
Don't forget the waste : Co2 (carbon dioxide, aka, greenhouse gas)
Easy! CO2 powered keg tappers!
The symmetry of the solution appeals to me for some reason.
*wanders off in search of a breakfast beer*
"Bah!" - Dogbert
42-65-65-72c -20-6d-6d-6d-6d-2c-20-62-65-65-72-2e
or
42-65-65-72-2c-20-62-65-65-72-2c-20-62-65-65-72-2
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
we need a lot of carbon for the nanotube elevator cable, start storing this stuff up, and cranking out the production line ... in the event that the current tech is not up to it, just make what we can and stockpile it, until technology catches up and we can put the hundreds of thousands of tonnes required to ggod use, and keep that carbon out of our greenhouse cycle ...
Well I realize that the process would be carbon neutral once you're growing plants to process, I was mainly thinking of the fact that since we're producing CO2 in high concentration, we may as well use it in high concentration to boost plant growth. The next step would be just making sure the CO2 isn't able to hit the atmosphere at large before the plants have a chance to use it. Other than that, you're right- it doesn't really matter if the CO2 gets out there as long as there are plenty of plants to compensate.
population control is the answer
I'm not a part of this cycle (I live in a tiny room in a shared house in a foreign country so I can't really talk to my neighbors or watch TV, I have an academic "job" that pays below minimum wage), so I'm confident that this is an unbiased opinion.
"Stuff" is pretty damn nice in itself. Big sofas, big HDTVs, expensive new PCs and game consoles, a house big enough to throw a decent party - these things are all genuinely enjoyable, when I get to play with them I love it. Conspicuous consumption isn't the only motivation for owning this "stuff"... particularly the games consoles, since your neighbors will just think you're a weird nerd instead of respecting your money-making acumen.
Beer gives the world light!
Beer, is there anything it can't do?
I guess with these big brewers they have alot of waste from mistakes and protocols for maintaining sanitary conditions? Pretty cool and probably fun way to prevent beer abuse. Don't throw that away!, Put it in the battery.
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
"No, no -- we all need big houses, to put all our stuff in."
How do you know his situation? Maybe he has a 5k sq ft house because he's got 7 kids and his elderly parents live in the first floor master bedroom and they in second. Maybe he's using LESS average square footage per person than you are in your studio apartment.
btw, my parents 6,500 square foot home uses less energy than my retrofitted in 1980s 100 year old farm house of around 2,500 sq ft. Larger buildings are more likely to use the newest tech, have solar, geothermal, higher SEER and energy star appliances, etc. Being comfortable lends itself HUGELY to spreading wealth, more energy efficient lifestyles and hence a better lifestyle, and the like. Fact is, people like yourself would probably go to the movie theater thinking it better, not realizing the gas alone easily outstrip what a home movie watcher uses in electricity.
"We need all our stuff (and the house) to keep up with the Joneses, and to watch TV without being sad about all those shiny things we don't have."
So what have YOU done about it? I bet you don't wear a burlap bag for clothes and 3 strips of wood per foot for shoes. If you are, then you aren't a hypocrite. If you don't, then you contributed to the excesses that you pretend to fight against.
"We need to keep the economy going so we can have well-paying jobs, manufacturing and supporting more and more stuff."
Well paying jobs reduces crime rates, keeps people happy, and improves human lives. Medical, pschyological, and social benefits abound which contribute to society. What you are proposing would be the opposite of what human civilization has been doing since the advent of history.
You seem to lack the ability to put together intrinsic human charateristics and couple them with well-thought out plans of reduction of impact.
"We need well-paying jobs to pay all the bills for repairing/maintaining our stuff.
Oh, and to pay the mortgage on our big houses."
Your cynacism makes little sense. A few negatives does not mean we throw out the whole.
The simple fact is, if we stop doing what we are doing now, the problem will continue because we do not have the ability to restrict everyone's ability to live, care for others, and enjoy life. If we continue on our path, humans have the ability to become more energy efficient to the point of reversing global warming and pollution--that's the nature of human progress, inclusive of technology, norms, policy, and legislation.
"[...not necessarily a direct comment on the GP post; this is just a cycle I've been thinking about...]"
Then YOU need to get better before you spout your crap.
Reduction of consumption is a good thing. Independence on energy is a good thing. But I hear more people bitching about what others should do, not taking care of what THEY can do themselves. Fact is, the very simple truth is that the solutions to energy and pollution will come from people doing more, not from those advocating others to reduce the quality of their lives.
It is a great cycle.
Recently I bought a dreamcast off of someone who bought a PS3.
I've gotten some fairly ok stuff for free from people making more room in their big house for nicer stuff.
I don't watch TV, so I don't know how far behind on keeping up I am.
The more people play in that cycle, the better my life from the run-off gets.
The CO2 output does not make a net contribution to atmospheric CO2 because it was originally pulled from the atmosphere by the plants used to make the brewing ingredients.
You could take the approach the government used at sandia national labs when testing the viability of algae for biodiesel over a decade ago: bubble the CO2 output through an algae raceway pond. They claimed they could capture over 80% of the CO2 output of a power plant, surely they can do the same here. The resulting algae can be made into biodiesel and ethanol (from its fats and carbs, respectively.) But it's true that you could use it as supplemental CO2 in greenhouse situations.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well - it's not even owned by an Australian company anymore is it?
Platinum, you noob. You lose one level of dungeon master!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Ummm...
6 kW. That's good. 6 kW per Hour? per Minute? per 660 gallons? One of the biggest problems with biological fuel cells is not their byproducts, but the rate of electricity generation.
Set the electrons free.
I'd also like to point out that this is using waste water, not alcohol laden beer. This is what's left. This is along the same lines as generating methane from your cow's waste to power your farm. It's useful, but mostly as a way to get rid of the poop.
hmmmm?
Airsoft and paintball gun tanks!
I do like programming things that work super quickly, especially when they work super quickly, super quickly.
What foreign country? Maybe you *should* watch TV, to help you with the language....
Anyway, it's a mixed bag, in my experience & observations.
Solid, well-functioning things are a pleasure to work with on a daily basis. These are very rarely cutting-edge technology, and you rarely need many of them.
I was thinking partly of those guys who get a super expensive car, then double-park it way out in the parking lot and freak out if a shopping cart veers towards it. Better get a high-tech security system, too, huh. And that big engine is real useful in getting them up to the speed limit +5 real fast.. but then they just have to sit there, unless they're a daredevil and/or don't care about the speeding tickets. I got a car that's good enough to be reliable, but already has a few dings (so I don't even wince if I bump the curb while parking, or if someone nicks it with a door in the parking lot). And it's got a puny diesel engine (and takes a little while to get up to speed..), but gets me where I want to go at 50 mpg.
Enough space in the house for a party -- maybe, if you are going to host a ton of parties. But you don't need 30 foot ceilings for that (everyone is going to be in the kitchen, anyway). The more I think about human resource consumption, etc., the more swimming pools, big houses, big cars, expensive entertainment and so on start to bug me. Isn't there something *wrong* if I spend 8 hours a day gaming? Or watching fluff TV? Is that the pinnacle of civilization -- I'm not forced to work, so I can at last become a useless lump on a (comfortable!) couch? If America is sucking down far more than our share of the earth's resources mostly just entertaining ourselves, aren't we doing something wrong?
Seriously (trying to swing away from self-righteous prick territory..), I'm not some kind of monk, nor do I think people should be (e.g., it's not hard to find the travel photos on my website.. at least that's partly educational). I'm just starting to feel more like we should know the real costs of what we buy -- in resources required (for manufacture, use, and disposal), in hazardous waste generated, in envy incited, in potential pain upon theft/damage/loss/failure, and so on. We don't take those into account normally.
It's not as if you can't put some effort into making your life a pleasant place to be. But there has to be more to life than *just* that pursuit.
Here's an incredible example:
http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/
This family's actually doing what I sort of partly do.
Parent: underrated++, insightful++
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
How do you know his situation?
I don't, hence my comment at the end about "not necessarily a comment on the GP post". I guess I'd also say the chances seem low that he's in an 11-person household.
Larger buildings are more likely to use the newest tech, have solar, geothermal, higher SEER and energy star appliances, etc.
Houses are not made out of air, they are constructed from natural resources and chemicals. Rooms in a house are not left empty, they are furnished. Energy is not "saved" - it's either consumed, or not. How does your parents' resource and energy consumption and waste production in their 6,500 square foot home compare with the average human? How will our natural resources hold out if everyone managed to set themselves up similarly?
Being comfortable lends itself HUGELY to spreading wealth, more energy efficient lifestyles and hence a better lifestyle, and the like. Fact is, people like yourself would probably go to the movie theater thinking it better, not realizing the gas alone easily outstrip what a home movie watcher uses in electricity.
Really, more energy-efficient lifestyles? Spreading wealth means buying more stuff, which means the stuff must be manufactured and then will need to be disposed of. High-tech gadgetry is often more fragile (and will probably break sooner) and contains more electronics w/ hazardous materials. In a way, you're right -- take one family who buys all of their appliances, gadgets, TVs, computers, grill, etc. paying top dollar, and compare another family who buys exactly the same number of things, but the cheapest models possible... obviously the first one wins. But it's pretty easy to beat *them* in turn, by simply buying fewer things.
Movie theater vs. home movie -- actually, I do think about those things. But you don't have to live in a hole and wear burlap to change your resource usage. My biggest resource usage problem is probably that my wife's family and mine live on different sides of the earth, and we don't see either of them very often but when we do... well, air travel is pretty expensive in these terms. I'm aware of it, and we could afford to travel much more often than we do. Other areas of our lives we're doing better.
So what have YOU done about it? I bet you don't wear a burlap bag for clothes and 3 strips of wood per foot for shoes. If you are, then you aren't a hypocrite. If you don't, then you contributed to the excesses that you pretend to fight against.
First, that has no bearing on whether my points are good (just on how convincing I can be...), but I'm not all noise. I traded down for a car that's twice as efficient, and I don't drive much. I don't wear burlap bags, but I don't spend much money on clothes and shoes, either (I don't think I've bought any shoes in years, actually...); I get stuff that lasts, and don't retire it at the first scuff. It doesn't reduce the quality of my life.
Your cynacism makes little sense. A few negatives does not mean we throw out the whole.
I don't argue for throwing out the whole. A communist system, for example, doesn't work well just because of human nature. We're always going to have a competitive streak, and we all have an interest in physical comfort, etc. -- I'm puzzling over ways to direct that less negatively. The TV-driven economy definitely isn't helping, though.
And I'm certainly not anti-technology -- at this point, we're pretty well screwed without some major technological leaps. The difference is that I don't think we can ignore the problems because "science" is working away on them.
The simple fact is, if we stop doing what we are doing now, the problem will continue because we do not have the ability to restrict everyone's ability to live, care for others, and enjoy life.
Correction -- the problem will be slightly smaller. And if your peers have any respect for you and your opinions, and model their behavior o
but let me guess -- you're not volunteering to go first?
Oh well, pass the marmite if you must.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I spent the last two days or so trying to figure out how to understand this discussion board, and how to navigate it; I posted a reply to a message a day or so ago, and have not even been able to find my own post, and cannot understand how to use this. Sorry, guys, I give up. It's too obtuse for me, and there are way too many pointless posts to weed through to try to use it.